Two Women and a Poisoning Read online

  But it wasn’t her dealings with Link that troubled her the most. It was her inner conflict—Grete Bende. Grete was no better than Link; Elli even felt obscurely that her friend and her husband were one of a kind. Grete cajoled and courted her as Link had done; they were disappointed ditherers, the pair of them, both thirsty for love. Violently, almost fearlessly, Elli cast out the conflict that had taken shape inside her. She didn’t want either of them the way they were. Distraught, she sided with temptation even as she resisted it.

  Elli was in a state of crisis. Her fate had caught up with her as Link’s fate had caught up with him. Her life too was in danger. After a furious scene with Link she thought of running away or poisoning herself—after first giving him lysol.

  •

  Why did Elli choose poison over a swifter means of killing? The hatred inside her was immense; she had to retreat in order to assert herself. It wasn’t only weakness and cowardice that made her choose the feminine method of murder. Link made repeated attempts to hang himself. How curious that she should always cut him down. She’d stand before him in horror—then cut the noose, lay him down, let him get on with his wretched life. It was also her filial instincts that played a part in her choice of method, for these remained strong even when she was near to delirium. She wanted to kill so that she could free herself from Link and return to her mother and father. Her husband’s elimination must remain unnoticed. Elli’s preference for poison was bound up with her regression to childish feelings and family loyalty. Then there was the bond of hatred that tied her to her husband. He had roused her to unite with him in hatred, and it was a hatred intent on killing but not on death. They had been killing each other all along; she wanted to keep him so that she could go on killing him. Even as she slowly poisoned him, she continued to cling to him. At the back of her mind, meanwhile, she was thinking in all sincerity: He’ll change his ways. That was the unspoken, uncertain but often-felt thought she kept from Grete: I don’t want to kill him at all, I only want to punish him; he’ll change his ways. Over and above her sadistic love, she felt a fondness for Link that sprang from her sense of family: he was her husband, after all. And, as she kept silent towards Grete, bitter and contemptuous despite her passion, she was under no illusions about the nature of Grete’s relations with Bende.

  Elli often seemed changed and absent when she was with her friend; she would apologise, saying that she’d been pondering how to get hold of something. Her fear of ‘not getting hold of anything’ and not knowing how to go about it was making her sick. At other times, she was confused, but ecstatic: ‘You’ll see, my love, I will fight for you and I will succeed. I shall know no rest in the world. But I’ll put him to rest.’

  It was to be rat poison. For two-legged rats, she would later write. It was the most unobtrusive—and something one might manage to lay hands on.

  Grete had followed these developments with fascination. Fearful at times, but always happy and always with a thrill of love, she watched her friend set off down this path. Her own marriage wasn’t bad at this time; she was far too absorbed in Elli’s affairs to take much notice of Bende. She listened in delight to Elli’s plans. It was fine by her that the man should go—that scoundrel, who had almost snatched her friend from her a second time. But she begged Elli to be careful, so she wouldn’t have to face years of innocent suffering. ‘Mother and I will never forsake you, ever.’ From now on, Elli, too, took little notice of her husband’s brutishness. Her fascination left her impervious to external irritants; nothing got through to her anymore. All that was over. Elli had only one thought now—murder. Her mind was made up.

  Elli Link went to Mr W., the chemist, and asked for poison to get rid of the rats in her flat. He sold her rat biscuits. Some time later she returned, asking him to please give her stronger poison—the biscuits hadn’t worked. Very carelessly, he sold her two marks’ worth of poison, ten to fifteen grams of arsenic. The decision to get rid of Link was firm in Elli’s mind; it was a child of her psyche and she had carried it full-term. Now she had to go through the horrors of putting her resolve into practice. She had no idea what she was letting herself in for.

  This was in the months of February and March 1922. It was easy at first. Maybe Elli did something to provoke it, maybe she simply let it happen. Link staggered home drunk one evening, threw his supper in her face and pushed her onto the bed, demanding mashed potatoes. It was in these that he received his first dose of poison. A second followed three days later. The man grew sick; gastric symptoms developed. He was laid up for eight days, then went back to work. After that he got worse and worse. The poison afflicted his entire organism. Elli saw that he was trying to sweat, but couldn’t—‘the stuff was stubborn’. All seemed to be going well. He was having trouble getting back on his feet, she was determined not to give up. But other things began to happen. Through the haze of her fascination, she dimly saw what she had done. One day, when Link was feeling better, he didn’t come home and she was afraid he’d collapsed—afraid a doctor had pumped his stomach and discovered the poison. Grete started to drop bleak, troubling remarks: apparently a person could burst from poison. Elli believed her and was afraid. Sometimes she didn’t know what to feel: she was filled with an awful restlessness, could walk as far as her legs would carry her. She asked Grete whether this was her guilty conscience.

  Grete saw the state she was in. If only Elli had given the man all the poison at once and put an end to everything. Then there was the hideous fear of discovery. ‘But my only love, do take care that it doesn’t come to light afterwards. The scoundrels aren’t worth that.’

  When Grete’s husband heard that Link was sick, he said jokingly: ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if old Elli hadn’t slipped him something. She’s always saying she’ll pay him back some time.’

  ‘In that case,’ Grete retorted, ‘the doctors wouldn’t say it’s flu that’s gone to his chest.’ But a neighbour, Mrs N., told Grete’s mother she thought there was something fishy about Link’s illness; she was sure Mrs Link had a hand in it.

  Mrs Link was distraught, all gone to pieces. Wearily she nursed her husband. She rallied, she faded. And he lay there and wouldn’t die. He was repellent to her in a new way—loathsome. A poisoned man. She saw what she was doing; he was a horror to her, a physical indictment. She nursed him, often going to great lengths to be especially nice to him. She had set herself a ghastly task. When, yet again, he recovered, she felt enervated. She would wait until the spring.

  Grete’s keen eye, her eagle eye, saw some of this. Was it not possible that Elli was in love with her husband? No, no, Elli replied aghast. What an idea. She was doing all this for Grete’s sake. She had to defend herself for worrying about Link; if she was as concerned as all that, Grete pointed out, ‘she needn’t bother giving him the stuff’. Grete had a tendency to exaggerate in her talks with Elli. Once she found herself boasting that she too was going to poison her husband. This, in spite of the fact that she generally got along tolerably with Bende, and always clung to him and fought for his affection. She had no intention of poisoning him. Elli let her have a little arsenic. Appalled, Grete threw it away, giving Elli the wretched excuse that Bende would stop eating at home if he noticed—and besides, she would have no part in the ‘victory’ if it came out. On another occasion, competing with Elli—but also to reward her—she told her what trouble she’d almost got herself into. She had tried, she fibbed, to give Bende hydrochloric acid, but he’d noticed and forced her to eat some herself and now she felt so sick. Elli believed her. Much of what Grete said and did at this time was no more than impassioned mimicry. She spoke of the violence she did herself at home. She felt nothing for Bende, she said, but thought it better not to take action yet. People would find it funny if both fellows went at once.

  •

  Elli was confronted with the awful sight of her sick husband pacing feverishly up and down the sitting room, almost crawling up the walls with pain. She suffered cruelly. She took refuge in her l
etters, spurring herself on: I won’t give up, I’ll make him pay—even if I end up biting the dust myself. Sometimes an animal indifference came over her. Things reached such a pitch that all tension suddenly gave way. When this happened, she would resignedly take him his invalid’s gruel and ‘finish him’ while she was at it. She took a positive pleasure in obliging him to his face and tipping poison into his food behind his back. ‘If only the swine would die soon. He’s a tough old swine though. Today I gave him drops, and plenty of them, and his heart suddenly started pounding like mad. He got me to make him compresses, but I put them under his arm instead of on his heart, and he didn’t notice.’

  These were rare moments of cynical respite. On other days she was beside herself with guilt and inner torment. She would lie before him, begging him to stay with her, promising to nurse him. At such times she was his wife again, the good daughter from Braunschweig, and he was the man given her by her father. Fear of punishment loomed: ‘If Link finds out he’s been poisoned, I am cruelly, mercilessly lost.’

  How Elli chopped and changed in the words and letters she exchanged with Grete at this time. Although the active, more masculine of the two, she now sometimes fantasised herself almost into the role of Grete’s bondwoman. ‘When I am finished with Link,’ she wrote between horrific reports on Link’s condition, ‘I hope I will have proved to you that it was all for you, my love, that I saw this through.’ Once, when the talk and rumours and false fears were too much for Elli, she took what was left of the poison and threw it down the lavatory. Then she was at a loss what to do. Her determination to get rid of Link forced itself on her, did violence to her. She racked her brains to find a solution. ‘Grete, see if you can’t get hold of something. I could tear my hair out. Why did I have to be such a fool? Now it’s all been for nothing. Please, get me something, Grete, please. I can’t believe I’ll ever be properly free of him, but I must—I will—get rid of him. I hate him too much.’ And the women sat together and cried; they had overreached themselves. Suspicious Grete sensed an unspoken reproach in her friend’s behaviour. Her heart ached, she wrote in one of her letters; she felt her guilt and feared for her love.

  Elli went once more to the chemist. Was again given poison. By this time, the victim was laid up at home or running from one doctor to the next. The doctors diagnosed influenza. Link’s fits of rage abated. But he remained grim and bad-tempered. Sometimes he vented his resentment at his wretched state on his wife. He was a work beast. If only he could get out, if only he could work. Sometimes, when he looked at Elli, he felt remorse. She sat beside him crying and he didn’t know why. To the very end there was no brightening or warming in his soul. The poison attacked his stomach and bowels, producing severe catarrhal inflammations. Vomiting and cholera-like diarrhoea occurred, especially after the larger doses. He grew very pale and grey, with headaches, neuralgia, weakness all over his body, occasional attacks of angina, deliria, swoon-like fits.

  The terrible days in late March before his end were days of intense strain for the women. Grete was, despite her fearfulness, the calmer of the two: she was far from the action and, more important, she felt a constant delight at the thought that something was being done for her. She and Elli were still reeling off the same old phrase: soon there would be no one to destroy their happiness. But they were often feverishly afraid. Over and over, Grete urged her friend to be calm, warning her that if she happened to be questioned, she should confess and feel no remorse. When Elli came to call earlier than usual one morning, Grete felt a shock of pleasure, thinking she was bringing a certain piece of news.

  Elli seldom felt anything for Link. She had only one thought in her mind now: there must be an end to this. Sometimes she felt renewed hatred for her husband because things had gone on for too long. Often she conjured up—or felt stir within her—the sweet, heady sense of fascination, the soothing feeling it gave her to tell herself: I am doing this for my friend, proving my love to her after inflicting such pain on her by going back to Link. In those days after her return she had thrown herself into her love with near violence—as never before. Now her love sometimes quietly took second place to her inclination to put an end to everything. As her hatred for Link diminished, so too her affection dwindled. But there was no going back. She harboured obscurely voiced thoughts of dying, disguising them as ways of escaping punishment: ‘If it comes to light and I have to pay for it, I’ll do away with myself at once.’ And in another letter: ‘If it comes to light—and, for all I care, it can—then my days, like his, are numbered.’

  •

  Towards the end of March 1922, the poison ran out again and neither Elli nor Grete could bear the suffering, the dread, the fear and trepidation any longer. Grete agreed that Elli should take her husband to hospital. Elli’s vigour was broken. Weak and grateful, she wrote to her friend, saying yes, she would do it; and her second marriage would be to her.

  Link was taken to Lichtenberg Hospital on 1 April 1922 and died the same day, aged thirty.

  A weight had fallen from Elli’s heart. She had no real thought for Link. She acted grief-stricken, but felt happiness and relief. Why? Because she no longer needed to kill, because she’d recovered her old self, because her own sickness was coming to an end. Soon, she hoped, her soul’s pendulum would be swinging steadily again. What had happened? Elli only felt dimly that an abundance of horror was gone. She didn’t feel harshly towards her dead husband; he scarcely entered her mind. At moments, she even thought wistfully of him. In a letter to her parents she said that Link had kept his promise in the end; he had changed his ways. She spoke only good of him—to herself and others. Fortune had been kind to her; she returned to her well-ordered, smoothly running world. The anxious strain of the past weeks gave way to joyful exuberance. Elli was in a state of confusion. She foresaw nothing.

  As always, she kept some of her feelings from Grete and was all joy with her. Elli was already thinking about the future: she didn’t want to get married just yet, but maybe later, if something cropped up—the chance to help out in a business and a man with a fat purse. ‘I’m the merry young widow,’ she said in delight, with no thought for Grete’s feelings. ‘I had so hoped to be free by Easter. I’ve nothing to wear—now I can buy myself something. If fortune smiles on you too, Mother won’t recognise us when she comes to visit. We’ll be the merry widows of Berlin.’

  Grete Bende had lived through the past weeks in fear and trembling, impatient for the day of the funeral. In the matter of Link’s murder, she saw herself as the receiver, as bad as the thief. She didn’t attend the funeral, but her mother did. Grete felt the need to comfort Elli: ‘He’s an out-and-out scoundrel, that man. He doesn’t deserve to find peace in the grave.’ But in another letter that day she wrote: ‘My love, I wonder whether you are thinking of me as he is lowered into the earth, for really I am more to blame than anyone. My face is burning as if on fire. It is twenty to four. Any minute now, if all goes according to plan, the great ceremony will begin and Mr Communist will go marching out of this world.’

  Elli needed no encouragement. Bold and cynical, if not entirely honest, she boasted to Grete: ‘Have carried out all my plans and proved my love to you—proved that my heart beat for you alone and that my love for Link was a pretence to the end. You sometimes thought I felt pity for him. No, my love. I’m only happy that I’ve done it—that I’ve stopped his foul, godless mouth for four marks.’

  But more and more, Elli began to feel chilled and sobered. She told Grete’s mother Mrs Schnürer about Link’s illness—how keen he’d been to get back to work and how his newfound kindness to her had more than once made her cry. She often sat with a wistful look on her face. The fascination was fading. It wasn’t that Elli feared punishment as Grete did, but that she was beginning to see things with awful clarity, to revert to her old state. Grete observed this with dismay, feeling that Elli was turning against her: ‘You are a great puzzle to me. How I worry and reproach myself. Even when I’m with you, your attitud
e towards me is always forced, as if you were trying to tell me that it’s my fault you did it.’ Grete’s distress was great. Once, at her wit’s end, she said she blamed herself for everything: Elli didn’t really love her; she could have begun a happy life with Link when she went back to him.

  The widowed Elli roused herself from her confused grief and defended herself: ‘Dear Grete, how can you say I’m upset about Link? Aren’t I boisterous enough for you? If all this was forced and false, I wouldn’t be in such good spirits. Believe me, there wasn’t a fibre in me that was moved. I was quite cold and did everything with a cold heart and haven’t the slightest regret. I am only glad to have found release.’

  •

  At about this time, Grete Bende, courting and competing for her friend, feigned activity and pretended that she too was planning to do away with her husband. Perhaps her mind was frenzied and delirious. She was harried by the pain and fear she felt for her friend. But for every step forward, she took two steps back. She consulted the wizened old clairvoyant Madame Feist, bought arsenic drops, told Elli she’d give them to Bende. She was extremely agitated, and her love for Elli was pushing her to do things that were not in her nature. She didn’t hate Bende in the least and when she embraced Elli, she grieved and wept in spite of her desire; something in her still strained after her husband. She kept putting her friend off—‘Wait for me, stay true to me; things here will take a little time’—all the while ecstatic at the thought of fetching Elli to live with her and her mother. Grete, warm-blooded, emotional Grete, was horrified when the pert summons came from Elli that she must be free for her by Whitsun. Dejectedly she read Elli’s letter of enticement: what a lovely time she was having all alone, no longer at anyone’s beck and call, no more need to make allowances or be anyone’s poodle. Grete, too, now got a glimpse of Elli’s childlike, callous side—of an Elli who was fun-loving and easy-going, but also ruthless. Grete was in a conflict, almost a crisis. It was something of a relief to her when disaster broke and all was discovered.